Conservativism and Liberalism

The following article was sent to me by a friend a few weeks ago, having had an interesting and busy few weeks I have not had time to reply to it, but I finally have some time to sit down and hammer this out. The article is by Stanford economist Thomas Sowell, and its basic point is that liberals are dreamers who are unwilling to see the world for how it is, and that the more experience one has with the world, the more conservative one becomes, barring the sort of buffers (judicial/ academic tenure, trust funds) that keep one from actually facing the real world.

Here is a David Brooks column that came out around the same time I received the Sowell piece, coincidentally. Brooks basically (and oh so gently) says that Sarah Palin is a bad idea, and actually unintentionally provides an argument that McCain would not be a very good man to have sitting next to the big button. More on that below.

Firstly, though, I think the Sowell argument has a terrific number of holes in it, the main one being that the article somewhat assumes that the world is static. While there may be certain unescapable realities, (like the need to defend yourself and country, at least for this millenium) the world has changed quite a bit in, say, the last hundred years, and Sowell fails to take into account that most of these changes a) have been overwhelmingly positive and b) would never in a million years have been allowed if conservatives ran everything. Just as one particularly relevant example, take civil rights. Sowell is a black man, and a hundred years ago, there'd be no chance in hell that he would be able to express his opinion in such a manner.

There is, of course, the argument that the economic progresses spurred on by conservative policies is what ultimately led to the country's social progress. While partially true, this argument misses several things. Firstly, broad social progress was made in many countries without the type of relatively laissez-faire economic system the United States has. Secondly, many of the tangible and legal gains made socially occurred before the Reagan administration and only later started to filter into becoming mainstream culture, and thirdly, even with economic progress, there have still been fights over social equality, it's not like it just happened smoothly or magically.

I will admit that without economic stability much of the social progress we've seen would have been impossible, and yet this is far from a cause of the effect.

Liberals may tend to imagine that things can change overnight, and that human nature is entirely dependent on circumstance, both true weaknesses, and they have a tendency to believe that inequality is simply a matter of reapportioning, which is also extremely dangerous and mistaken. But there are very few mainstream political liberals in America who still subscribe to the above, while there are quite a few conservatives that subscribe to an equivalently extreme ideology in power in the country.

Sowell ignores in his examples maybe the one best popular figure who was sheltered from experience, someone who got through college and then graduate school, and even business life, on the wings of his family: Dubbya. As if. As if being a trust funder would make you automatically liberal, as if most of the people who have to work themselves to go through college and had a tough life automatically would be conservative because of their experience in "the real world," as if experience automatically meant disappointment, or that the harder the life, the more conservative the fellow. All of this is garbage.

If we take (as I think Sowell does) conservativism to mean the political trait of steady-as-it-goes-ism, and liberalism as being the trait of using the engine of government to effect change in society, than there's good reason why the older one gets, the more conservative one gets beyond wising-up (though certainly this does happen.) As I've mentioned before, change is generational and not as often individual, that is, change in society doesn't come because most people want it to, it happens naturally as new generations are born into different circumstances, and the more different their circumstances the faster the wheel moves. This can be disquieting when one can't get a grip on their own society, it can feel like one's lost...(like, say, certain older people writing letters instead of email.)

The above definitions are necessary because we do not live in a static world. Certainly Sowell is not defending the 1750's brand of conservatism, what were called the loyalists in the revolutionary world, right? Saying that conservatives stand for slow change effected by people may seem to take the burden off of this argument, and while there is a strain of conservatism that believes, perhaps heartily, in this, in fact the vast majority of people who are culturally conservative don't advocate any sort of progress towards equality in opportunity but are more likely to react (hence reactionary) against it violently, tipping their hands off as to how they really feel. (See ex-Majority leader Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond being elected president and how that would have kept so much of today's "mess," from ever happening. While again theoretical conservatives are more likely to say that change is a slow process coming from below, in practice this is simply not true.

Experience may well make you examine your beliefs, or disappointment, at least, but that does not mean one will necessarily become conservative, or that those who are conservative have, on average, more of this kind of experience than everyone else. Some kids are idiots, and idealistic, but often kids are stupid in the opposite direction from the left. Kids are blind, but sight does not necessarily improve with age, and one can be blind and walk in many directions.

Another reason people "become" conservative is that as they get older, and have to take care of themselves, they become less concerned with the state of society and more concerned with their own house, not because they've changed their mind about anything fundamental, or because the experience of paying bills every month has made them realize that poor people are lazy, but because things that seemed important earlier in life just aren't so much anymore. It's not becoming conservative so much as losing a system of beliefs never acted upon in a change of situation. Again, this experience is not of the "oops, I made a mistake" variety, just the "oops, I don't actually really care that much about what happens outside of my door as I used to think I did because everyone else did." I think this is probably the line of thinking closest to Sowell's, and yet I see no need to label this process "experience" generically, nor do I imagine that leaving college equals, somehow, disappointment, and that the result is a more mature, wise, realistic adult.

The biggest problem with the Sowell essay, beyond the specific argument, and with others of its type, both on the left and on the right is that, as we've seen time and time again over history, in the last hundred years, and even recently, no side or party is ever right about anything, since an ideology carried forth to its extreme basically always brings the worst things possible. This is what the generation in college (or me, and others informally polled near my age) was so excited about at the beginning with Obama. There is a way that includes certain things that Thomas Sowell would undoubtedly agree with that the die-hard liberals of his age would not that have been shown to be effective, that also includes age-old talking points of the left, and this way is inaccessible from either side exclusively, which has been the promise of Obama, whether or not he can carry that through. In a way, this could ideally be the pinnacle of American government, the compromise between two competing ideas that makes everyone better off. Brooks' article brings up an even more interesting point about the ability to bring conflicting views into agreement and take action.

And this is also basically the best argument I can think of for transparency in government. Transparency creates more record and more fact, and less spin. The more secrecy there is, the more is kept hidden or obfuscated, the easier it is to distort what's happening, in any circumstance.

Prudence is one of the qualities Brooks talks about, but how surreal is it that the candidate who fits Brooks' bill as displaying "the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation... [the] ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together...the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight" is clearly Obama? This is Obama's strongest point as a potential president, and his weakest as a candidate (or at least it ties into his weakest point as a candidate: being unable to boil it down simply, quite likely a structural impossibility.) I've been saying the whole race that this critical ability, so clearly lacking in our current president, is what's needed and what this man has. He may not have governmental experience, but he certainly has this trait of being able to take in multiple points of view and reconciling them. Brooks' words are so similar to some of the profiles of Obama that they could have been cut-and-pasted from them. Clearly, either Obama has experience or prudence does not necessarily come from it. The candidate with the type of experience Brooks talks up has become brasher and even more impulsive the longer the campaign has gone on, taking leap after leap only to come back a few days later and leap in the other direction.

Another side note on this, I've been getting mail lately that's pointing out how much of a disadvantage Obama is running with, partly, though not entirely, due to race. McCain is running with some baggage that would have destroyed any black man immediately (like, say, graduating at the bottom of his class, divorcing his first wife, having a wife who approproiated painkillers from her own charity, Palin's unwed teenage daughter, etc.) while Obama's life story, tacked onto a McCain type character, would be an instant president-maker. Just imagine how different the news organizations and the far right would have reacted if it were Obama's daughter and not Palin's who was pregnant. I don't think anyone with anything like an objective point of view would be able to say with a straight face that it would be able to be turned into a positive in the almost farcical way it has for Palin. This is bullshit, pure and simple, and, for all their experience, it is not likely to be something a conservative today would care too much about bringing up as an issue, or as something that might need to be examined in our collective psyche. But it does.